


What it is to Burn

by Quinara



Series: Long Distance to London [5]
Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Angst, F/M, Reunion, community: sb_ashtray, long distance, season: post-series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-28
Updated: 2012-08-28
Packaged: 2017-11-13 02:31:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/498463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quinara/pseuds/Quinara
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After three years in a long distance relationship, Buffy’s the one who cracks first.</p><p>(Part of a series, but can definitely be read as a standalone.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. one

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the sb_ashtray community on Livejournal for the prompt 'burnt out'. But then it was also to answer a question I have always thought about. With those Spuffy fics set in Angel S5, when Spike and Buffy decide to live apart for a while, what happens next? How do they get to the happy futureverse they so obviously end up in? Set in October 2006, this is my version.

There were two sets of keys in Buffy’s handbag. The first were her own, all her various house keys and the ones for the weapons lockers at work; the key ring was a few years old, from when she and Dawn had first arrived in the UK and gone out for the day at a theme park. There’d been this awful vampire-themed roller coaster, cheesier than Castle Dracula, but after Sunnydale it had felt something like a release. And the photo hadn’t made them look too much like a Munch painting, so it had seemed like a good souvenir at the time.

The other set was notionally a spare. Every key for her house, the two front door keys and the one for the French windows, the side alley and even her shed, they were on there. Some of them she’d had since they first moved in and they hadn’t originally been a set, just spare keys in a jam jar. Then, a few months ago, she’d found herself buying a Ramones key ring at Camden Market, because she’d gone all the way up the Northern Line to get there and refused to go home empty-handed. That too had lived in the jam jar for a while, until she’d been bored last weekend, heating up her soup. Once she’d threaded all the keys _on_ , she couldn’t quite bring herself to take them off again.

Now she couldn’t leave them alone, so they were living in her bag. She held them in her hand sometimes, all neat and tinkling, just to think what they would look like bulked out with a car fob, or the desk key for furniture she didn’t own.

This was one of several things that made Buffy think she might just be losing her grip on reality.

It was Dawn’s fault for going to college, really. That had been a watershed moment and it was making her think, keep drawers and coat hooks free, spend three whole minutes staring at the beer aisle at Sainsbury’s…

It had been three weeks since they’d moved her into dorms. Now, as Buffy sat in her living room – devoid of a sister and devoid of her books, silent and echoing around the EastEnders closing credits – she had to accept it. She was lonely. Not cripplingly so, but not transiently either. Her nest was empty, and the twigs were proving themselves cold comfort.

As the programme changed over, her boyfriend rang, which was something of a relief from the feeling. But this was the boyfriend she hadn’t actually seen in the flesh since said flesh had burned to a crisp, and that was three years ago. She talked to him as she made some dinner, because she hadn’t yet found the will to cook that evening, and she laughed and rambled like always, but she couldn’t quite block out the echoing silence of her house, filling her opposite ear.

Lying in bed that night, there was nothing for Buffy to do but stare into the dark.

* * *

She had a plan. She made it a habit to never be without a plan, and this was no exception. It was an old one, truth be told, and she’d been honing the details for over three years. The first part was the trickiest, though, which is why it had never been attempted.

But that day, one day in late October, Buffy accepted there was no other way around it – and around it she was going to go.

“OK, so here’s the thing,” she told Giles as she took a seat in his office. He was looking at her, so it took an extra breath to steady herself, but she managed to say it anyway. “I need to go to LA.”

Immediately she knew her tone was wrong, because Giles was sitting up straighter, reaching for his phone across his heavy wooden desk. “What’s happened?” he said, on alert. “Has there been an escalation?”

“Huh? Oh, no no no,” she quickly reassured, waving her hands in an attempt to calm him down. He relaxed – and that made sense; Giles knew as well as her that Wolfram and Hart had been silent on the West Coast for eight months and more. “It’s nothing like that. It’s just…” Looking up, she breathed in, trying to think of her phrasing. “I thought I could take a vacation?”

“Ah,” came the reply as Giles caught on. He started shuffling papers, and she knew his fingers were itching for his glasses and a handkerchief. “I must say,” he commented carefully, with distance, “I’ve been surprised you haven’t asked for time off before now.”

It was noncommittal, but it was nonetheless an unequivocal statement of support. He could be pretty elegant with words sometimes, her Watcher. “Well, I’ve had…” It was a pity she didn’t have the same skill. “There’s been work and stuff,” she continued. “And –” No, she told herself, she couldn’t finish that sentence yet. Her second problem had to wait. She had a plan. “Could I have a week off?” she asked instead.

Giles didn’t even blink. “Take two,” he replied, as if he was going to insist. They both knew, of course, that she couldn’t really be spared for more than a fortnight.

“Thanks.” Buffy smiled, but it was forced. Most of her smiles were these days. She felt kind of like the bland, impressionistic office art behind Giles’ head: not quite what she was meant to be.

But she was relieved – and grateful. This was relief she was feeling, relief she was past stage one. She just wished she didn’t have to bring up the other thing.

Apparently Giles caught it anyway. “Buffy?” he asked, frowning.

Her first attempt at answering came out as a defensive, “I just –” Swallowing and shaking her head then, she calmed herself, focusing at her fingers where she ran them along the edge of Giles’ desk. “I don’t know how to start with this,” she dove in, unable to bail out now, “but you said – a while ago,” and he had, actually “that things were gonna be better, you know, with the Council’s finances?”

“Yes…” Giles agreed, looking a little embarrassed. She felt bad, talking about money like this, but he _had_ said once that when the Council’s assets and things were sorted out there would be more money around, so things would be different. They’d be able to hire someone who knew about kenjutsu or whatever to lead sword practice, rather than relying on her. And she’d change pay grades.

“Well, I was hoping I could ask,” Buffy continued as carefully as she could, trying to maintain eye contact, “if that better was gonna be soon?” Things were already changing a little, Buffy knew, and she tried to convey that with her expression. She was earning more than a year ago, and they’d been refurbishing the offices. For the first year after they’d moved to London, the Council had been little more than a dump, but they had nicer furniture now. The pot plants were alive. The art was still bad, but there was more of it; that earned you points in that _Sims_ game Dawn had, didn’t it? “I mean,” Buffy cut off her thoughts, refocusing on Giles, “it’s not like I _can’t_ afford to go.” She had to stick with the plan. “He’s got that shiii-craphole apartment anyway, so I don’t need a hotel – but I…”

Grimacing with embarrassment, she tried to wait for Giles to interrupt. Unfortunately he just looked bewildered.

In the end she had to force herself to carry on. “Well, uh, you see…” And this was the moment she really cringed inside. “So, the thing is, the flights are kind of gonna max out my credit cards, and I still have some bills to pay this month – so I was hoping, maybe, I don’t know if –”

“ _Buffy,_ ” Giles finally interrupted then, making her jump and look him once more in the eye. He sounded more shocked than she’d hoped. “How…?” All at once she felt terribly, terribly guilty for failing to save when things were so good – because they _were_ good. When she did the currency conversion on her wages she knew the Doublemeat Palace guys would think she was some kind of joke.

And yet… “I didn’t mean for this to happen,” she tried to explain, begging Giles to understand. “But everything – when we got here – it always cost a little more than I… And Dawn, she had all her new friends and I wanted her to have what they had, you know, what I had when I was her age, and I thought I could make it work, so…” Biting her lip, Buffy wasn’t sure what to say, really. She hadn’t plummeted into debt by any means – not like when she’d leapt into that abyss of non-earning death and robothood – but after three years of a little extra purchasing than she could afford, looking back, and after the washer broke and everything with the roof… She’d tried so hard to build a travel fund – any fund, really – but it had been eaten away, every time.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Giles asked eventually, gentle but still so bewildered. She looked up, surprised to see that he looked mostly disappointed in himself. “I know you’re careful enough; you shouldn’t have had to… We agreed your salary,” he reminded her, “on the same basis as everyone else: we kept it artificially low for the time being to maintain as much liquidity as we could while things got back on track.” She knew that – but he sounded strangely guilty as he added, “You weren’t supposed to scrimp and save for things like – you should have mentioned…”

“But I _couldn’t_ ,” Buffy interrupted, not sure he quite remembered how much money he’d really given her. Nor some of the things he’d once said about this relationship. “After you helped me get my house? That was so much, Giles, I…”

But he was rolling his eyes, sounding bitter. “No Watcher would have lived in that house,” he told her, as if trying to make her understand something. She wasn’t sure what. “Even _with_ the postcode, any middle-rank researcher would have expected a third storey and higher ceilings.”

At that, she just felt offended on the behalf of poor Number 63. It couldn’t help being overshadowed by some of the bigger places in her neighbourhood. “You could live in my basement,” she defended. “I just haven’t fixed the damp yet.” Not that that was important. “I mean…”

Pre-empting her other concerns, Giles waved a hand. “You deserve to have your own home,” he dismissed, “and I don’t trust these 95% mortgages. It’s always best to be on a firmer footing – and the rates are far more reasonable. Not to mention,” he added, looking at her over the rim of his glasses, “you’ve been paying me back quite dutifully with that standing order every month…”

“But –” Buffy tried to interrupt again, not sure what she was meant to be saying. They were definitely off-plan now. All she wanted to do was grovel for a loan, but he wasn’t letting her.

“Look,” Giles explained forcibly, finally taking off his glasses in one rhetorical swoop to his handkerchief. “It’s not my money I’m paying you with, it’s the Council’s. It’s _yours._ ” She wasn’t sure how that worked, but Giles had been saying it since day one. He always looked at her like she was his boss. “You could have used it to build a James Bond army barracks on a private island in the South Pacific, but you didn’t. You entrusted it to me to rebuild this organisation, for which I am eternally grateful.”

“Well, what else was I gonna do with it?” she asked, uncomfortable as she rubbed her toes into the carpet. “I’m really… I’m not so good as a figurehead. Honestly.”

With an overdone expression of seriousness, Giles looked like he was weighing up her leadership skills in his head. “However you feel about it,” he finished, actually serious once more, “I’ve been working with Faith on our bonus structures, and we…” A fond expression crossed his face, which Buffy couldn’t quite track. “I didn’t want to raise anticipation too far in advance of their introduction,” he continued, focusing on her once more, “but our main principle is reward for length and commitment of service, on which point Faith has been quite adamant that anyone like you – well, like you both, really – who ‘takes it for the team’, they should receive a pension of more than enough to spend any life after resuscitation ‘chillaxing the hell out’.”

Buffy blinked. “Chillaxing?”

“A portmanteau of ‘chill out’ and ‘relax’, apparently,” Giles confirmed, sounding perplexed. He shook his head. “The basic idea is that of a very comfortable life, in thanks for, well, literally giving it up for the cause. There were some details to thrash out, because I worried we might have an element among the cohort seeking out some sort of Blighty wound, as it were, but the statistics on post-traumatic CPR would frankly put anyone…”

“Giles?” Buffy interrupted, almost certain she was hearing things wrong. _Blighty wound?_ “You’ve lost me.”

Still apologetic, he smiled at her before he explained. “It’ll be a few months more until we can fully finalise the dratted legal documentation,” he said, “but after that you will, quite honestly – especially since talking to Willow I hear there was a _third_ time you never mentioned…” At that point, he managed to catch himself. “You’ll be able to do anything you want,” he said.

“Oh.” She worked out what he was saying then. It was an embellishment on what he’d been saying all along, really, what they’d all been saying. The Hellmouth was gone and they were free, free and potentially rich, at some unspecified point in the future.

The problem was, she was getting a little sick of living in the future, depending on promises and possibilities. It was time to deal with the now, and right now she was sitting in a run-down tower block no one even tried to call a skyscraper. And she was miserable.

“Look,” she said. Her voice came out duller than she meant it too. “I just wanna go and visit Spike.”

* * *

The cheque Giles wrote came with the insistence it was a gift, not a loan, but Buffy knew she’d have to get him something really nice for his birthday next year. No more socks and ink cartridges. He promised she’d have enough money by then that it wouldn’t be a problem, but she’d believe that when she saw it.

The next few days she spent in a daze, not quite sure what to do with herself – but she knew, at least, that she wasn’t the only one.

_“Hey, uh, I’m coming to visit.”_

_“Oh, right.”_

_“Yeah.”_

_“Wait. You mean – here? Me? What? When?”_

_“Saturday. For two weeks.”_

_“… Bloody hell.”_

It took the plane touching down in LAX for the reality of it to catch up with her, when it did so with a vengeance. As they wound down the runway her palms started sweating, the heat reflecting from the cover of her passport; her heart didn’t know what to do with the adrenaline and it took her about five seconds to realise what the beep meant when the seatbelt sign turned off.

Shuffling along with the herd, Buffy made her way through Immigration and reclaimed her zebra-print impulse-purchase a little while later. The AC made her shiver as they filtered through into Arrivals, but she made it, looking around unable to take anything in.

Something in the back of her mind registered a figure in black standing up from a bank of seats, so she felt it as her feet began trundling her over. He was watching her, though their eyes didn’t quite meet, and for a moment he looked just like one of the many photographs she had of him, frozen in time.

She’d always wondered how accurate those reproductions were, if immortal bodies really didn’t change. For that moment there didn’t seem to be a difference, but an instant later his expression flickered with some silent reaction. Blue irises slammed into her angle of vision and muscles crinkled, echoing the enigmatic quirk of his smile. He looked older than she remembered, three years older, every worry she’d heard he suffered writing over the worries she remembered from before. The development of his face, that was the same, still frozen in time, but he wore his features just a little differently. He looked at her with three more years of memories.

“Hello,” Spike said – and his voice felt softer on her ears than down the telephone line. More whole. The grin on his face was widening, as if he couldn’t quite batten it down.

She wasn’t supposed to be twenty-five when she looked at him, nearly twenty-six. How could she have been twenty years old, young and fragile, when she dominated him into bed? How could she have been sixteen when they first met? His physical presence was so…

“Sorry,” she said, shaking her head as the silence went on too long. With almost a pop of decompression, her mind shuttered away from abstract thought and caught up with the faint sting in her eyes and the stretch of her mouth and cheeks. She was smiling, and suddenly the man in front of her wasn’t an obscure Sunnydale memory, but her boyfriend, whom she knew like the back of her hand. Someone had taken her photos and her letters and his voice and given them a physical reality, embroidered a dream into vampire form.

When had she forgotten this existed?

“How was the flight?” he asked as she walked into his arms. His voice was familiar, level with familiarity, as if it was actually them who spoke almost every day.

Somehow, her voice came out the same. “Eh; it was OK. The food was terrible, but I’m getting more familiar with your culture now. They had that _Wallace and Gromit_ with Shaun the Sheep and Del Boy fell through a bar.”

“Not the one with the chandelier, then?” It was only the feel of him that was new, even if her head knew exactly where to go on his shoulder.

“Nah.” And, God, his forearms squeezed more firmly than anyone else she knew.

* * *

It was no surprise to either of them, she didn’t think, that they started attacking each other the moment Spike’s apartment door was closed. Really, Buffy was surprised they made it that far, but it was a lot easier to smash her lips against his when there was a hard wooden surface to slam him against. _”Please be real,”_ she was apparently begging him out loud, groping under his shirt as his thigh thrust up between her legs and she kicked her feet out of Rocket Dog ballet flats. _“You have to be real,”_ she kept trying to believe it, even as the hand in her hair wrenched her head up and her words were swallowed by lips she’d never quite kissed like this.

 _“Tell me what you want,”_ Spike was purring in her ear. Even as she was carried across the room, dumped on the bed and covered by a body, part of her still felt like he was talking on the phone and she was lost inside a fantasy. _“Gotta give me some idea, else what am I gonna do with you?”_

That part was a lie, because he was getting her clothes off quite well, just as she was pulling off his shirt and yanking at his shoelaces. They were sitting up on the bed; she was straddling his crotch and leaning backwards, one arm secured on his shoulder and the other helping him drag off a sock. _“You know me,”_ she whispered as they swapped arms, coming in close for a kiss before they aimed hands at his other boot. This was always the trickiest part; she’d forgotten. _“What do you think I want?”_

 _“After two years of foreplay?”_ he mused for a while, until he’d unhooked her bra and she was under him again, bouncing on mattress springs. As he spoke she kept her eyes closed, curling arms around his shoulders and legs around his hips. _“Hmm…”_ It still felt like a fantasy, but it was fun to make him shiver even in her head, and kisses under his ear always did just that. _“Figure you want to be nailed to this bed so hard you go numb.”_

 _Yes,_ she thought but didn’t say, arching her back as his fingers found the fly of her jeans, relaxing so he could drag them down her thighs. Her moan seemed articulate enough, sounding in her throat as he kissed her again.

“Also figure there’s good reason not to do that.”

He said it softly, raising a hand from the mess around her knees to rest his fingers on her temple, smoothing a thumb across her brow. The weight of his elbow made her head rock on the covers. At the feeling of it, her eyelids fluttered open and the sight of his face made her stomach drop away.

“Oh,” she said, as her sense of illusion vanished. A bolt of wooziness hit her, oncoming jetlag, but she saw him. He was real and his right hand was still tracing the inside of her thigh, which almost made her feel shy. “Oh wow,” she breathed, shaking her head against his fingers. “I think I’m still reacting.”

“Tell me about it,” he replied, looking bemused as he glanced around the bed area of his apartment. It was as drab as he’d ever described it, cold greys and blues and cheap, utilitarian furniture. Exposed brick. “Half of me wants to know if you’ve any new wisecracks from the postman,” he snarked, before he looked back, eyes alight. “The other half feels like you’ve risen from the dead.”

She smiled up at him, relieved he felt the same. “Me too,” she said, before kissing him slower, more softly. She hadn’t even bothered looking around the apartment when they’d come inside, because she knew where everything was, what it looked like. And yet the duvet felt so unfamiliar on her skin. “You’re like – something amazing that I…” Suddenly the feeling wasn’t so pleasant anymore. _What did I miss happening?_

He nuzzled his nose against hers and the _newness_ of it was enough to make her breath catch. She didn’t know what to do with the depth of feeling she could read on his face. “You are – _extraordinarily_ beautiful,” he said at last, sounding utterly conflicted. “You know that?”

When she kissed him this time, she found herself desperate to know what he felt like, what she could make his body do in light of everything she’d long since learned. “Don’t say anything,” she whispered, tipping him onto his back and pulling his belt through the buckle. Kissing him again. “Just nail.” Thankfully the feel of his cock wasn’t too jarring in her hand; she hadn’t misremembered that badly. Smiling into his gasps, she told him, “In my fantasies you talk too much.”

“Yeah, well,” he replied contrarily, tossing her back across the bed so he could catch her under his weight again. His smirk was so much more infuriating outside of her imagination. It was intoxicating. “In _my_ fantasies –” At last, then, finally, those hands were scoping out everything between her legs she’d never _really_ got the right angle on. “– you’re a domineering bitch.” And, boy, did the cocky bastard know what he did to her. “So you just lie there, all right?”

Pulling down his jeans by the sweat on the soles of her feet, she slapped two hands to his backside and aimed the front of him where she usually aimed. “How about you make yourself use-” she commanded, only to swear as he pushed in.

The unexpected sensation made her spasm, panting as her chin slammed to her chest and then fell back. She remembered now, quite suddenly, how long it had been since she’d felt anything do this that was outside of her control.

Breaking banter, Spike seemed to remember too, whispering, “This all right?” Right then there was a moment, one where she realised how many years it had been, how far she’d travelled that day. She realised he was ready to hold off and it almost made her panic.

But she didn’t, not yet. She clung to him instead, encouraging him on. “Just be here,” she hissed, trying to make it true.


	2. two

Gradually, Buffy adjusted. They didn’t leave the apartment much for the first few days, ordering take-out when they needed food and re-acclimatising themselves to each other in the controlled environment that was Spike’s home. Obviously, there was a lot of sex: their imaginations had long outstripped the possibilities of one three-month affair o’ misery, so they had a lot to catch up on.

However, there were also the delights of diet pill infomercials and made-for-TV movies on Lifetime. Buffy didn’t think she’d really missed them, but they were fun to mock – both of them laid out on the couch and Spike as the big spoon, squawking every time she threw popcorn over her head. Also, his Xbox 360 had this game with a cute cartoon dragon, which she kind of rocked at, much to his manly dismay.

All in all, she was feeling pretty settled by the second week. Of course that was when Spike received a visitor.

They were getting ready to go out, not for the first time but finally on a formal date, with reservations and everything. The vamp himself was in the bathroom, putting the finishing touches to his hair. He didn’t need the mirror, obviously, but he liked to be by the sink so he didn’t have to walk around with gelled-up hands. Buffy approved highly of this practice and so, because of that, she was the one who answered the knock at the door.

When she opened it, she blinked. She knew who it was, but since the great Illyria did _not_ pose for photographs, Buffy had never seen the Old One up close. She was… Well, Buffy hadn’t expected her to look quite so alien as she was, in the end, her blue skin less like make-up and more like a crystalised, gelatinous – _shell_. And the catsuit… It looked like beetles had done crochet.

Buffy’s own appearance was apparently far less striking; she _had_ to roll her eyes as the demon woman brushed right past her and strode into the apartment. “Where is Spike?” she demanded, offering no other explanation and basically ignoring the Slayer in the doorway.

As far as Buffy was concerned, two could play at that game. _“Spike!”_ she yelled in the direction of the bathroom, not answering the question and closing the door perfunctorily. _“You’ve got a visitor!”_

 _“Who is it?”_ came the response.

Eyeing up Illyria’s imperious stillness, Buffy yelled with added insolence, _“God-King of the Primordium!”_

 _“Oh, tell her to piss off!”_ Spike replied, not sounding impressed. _“I’m on holiday…”_ Nonetheless, he appeared a few seconds later, when he seemed utterly unsurprised to find Illyria already standing in the centre of his living room. “What do you want, Blue?” he groused, looking _very_ dapper with his hair all fixed up and his shiny jewellery and what was, Buffy could be almost certain, black eyeliner. She’d read that that was almost back in fashion for men…

Distracted, she almost missed Illyria’s response. Not that it amounted to much. “I grow weary of your elder’s company,” she stated, not explaining anything. She looked really out of place against Spike’s scabby brown couch. “He fights as one uncertain of his strength, conserving all fervour.”

Apparently able to decode this gibberish, Spike raised one sexy man eyebrow. “Thought you’d be glad for the rest,” he told the god-king, dipping an appreciative glance as Buffy sidled up to his most expensive pair of jeans. “You’re always going on at me for doing things wrong and getting in your way.”

Ah yes, Buffy remembered with not a small amount of nostalgia. Spike was great at getting in the way on patrol, with all his jumping and rushing around. She recognised the sour look on Illyria’s face quite well now, because it was never a nice feeling to realise you missed that sort of thing. At least not to start with.

“A true ruler must be the master of unpredictable circumstance.” The gibberish was getting more transparent, too, because Buffy could understand plainly. _I’m bored,_ Illyria was saying. _Entertain me._

That, Buffy decided, would not do at all. “Spike,” she demanded, raising her eyebrows as she turned to check her boyfriend’s face for guilt. “Have you been irritating other women behind my back?”

“What?” he replied immediately to her tone, sounding startled. Getting the joke then, his face relaxed and he smoothed an arm around the waist of her not-silk midi shirtdress. (Demure looked good on her with strappy sandals; she had a ton of hair these days.) “No, sweetheart, I promise,” he soothed, dropping a sarcastic little kiss to her hairline. The extra second he spent nuzzling indicated that he knew, nonetheless, part of her was honestly jealous. He reassured her with a firm, steady moment of eye-contact. “It’s still only you.”

Buffy was inclined to believe him, but Illyria interrupted her planned gesture of forgiveness. “You are Buffy,” she said, like that made her particularly repulsive.

“And what’s it to you?” Buffy herself slung back, getting comfy against Spike’s chest.

Tilting her head like some sort of exotic bird, the Old One fixed Buffy in her stare – before her gaze jerked away again to Spike. “You addressed me once by that name,” she spat, as if she was still annoyed about it. “Used that title, ‘sweetheart’. You tried to touch my hair.”

Buffy was back to being very, very confused. She looked up over her shoulder. “Huh?”

As if reliving a bad memory, Spike shook his head. “Coljett venom,” he told her, squeezing the arm around her. “I was delirious, hallucinating.”

“When was this?” She wasn’t actually accusing him of not telling her about it, because there wasn’t time to tell each other every little thing that happened – but this sounded important.

“A few months ago?” It didn’t help when it looked like he’d consciously chosen not to mention it.

“You said you were sorry,” Illyria intoned in real accusation. “And then you said I shouldn’t let you waste my ti–”

“All right, that’s enough,” Spike interrupted, his expression stormy. Illyria closed her mouth mulishly. “I told you – I’m on holiday, so you can sod off. If Angel’s being a pain in the arse, then ditch him, I don’t care, but I am not - _there_.” Buffy felt him clutching her harder than ever, but she didn’t feel secure. “We’re going out and you’re…” After a moment, his anger seemed to lose its way. “Another time, all right?” he said. “Another time.”

Buffy realised then that she needed to know what had just happened. “What did she mean?” she asked, pulling out of Spike’s arms so she could turn her back on the Old One. There were shadows on Spike’s face, ones she knew she should have seen before. “What did _you_ – mean?” As he looked away, she did what she could never do on the phone and stepped in close, curving her palm around his jaw so he would look at her. “What’s going on?”

They hadn’t actually spoken much about _them_ , had they? Not this week. Really, they rarely spoke about it, concentrating more on what was going on around them. Now, standing in this warm basement apartment, the air smelling like their shower, Buffy wondered if she’d missed something.

Or had she? Spike’s face was inscrutable, like she knew it wasn’t meant to be, but what it was too often for her. He was touching fingers to her wrist, gentle but tense with repressed energy. As his eyelined eyes kept flickering over her shoulder to Illyria, Buffy at least knew that all he wanted right then was to go out and talk on their own.

Who was she to deny him?

Even as her stomach sank, Buffy acquiesced, retreating to get her bag as Spike grabbed his keys. They ushered Illyria out of the door along with them, but she didn’t get to come in the taxi.

* * *

They were sitting on the pier when he told her, taking in the lights and the blue salt smell of the sea. Buffy was eating churros; her fingertips were coated in grease.

Dinner had been nice. Spike had apologised for how touristy the restaurant had turned out to be, but she hadn’t minded. It had seemed a little strange that he hadn’t come to know his hometown better, that he didn’t have anywhere more interesting to take her, but she hadn’t mentioned that. All she’d wanted from the evening was dinner out with Spike – and that she had got, complete with waggly-eyebrowed banter and sneaky morsels of food fed to her on fork tines.

Now their evening had descended into comfortable silence, darker and more intimate than any of the conversations they’d had. They’d had phone calls like this, she remembered, but nothing similar since she’d come to LA. It was soothing, to a certain degree.

“You know,” Spike began, the grit in his voice in no way at odds with the cool breeze. “Sometimes I have no idea what we’re doing here.” She glanced at him, but he wasn’t looking at her. There was a frown etched between his eyebrows, like it had been there for a long time, and she wasn’t sure if she was meant to see it. “Blue and I… It’s obvious Angel can’t stand us, not compared to whoever it was he had signed up the first time round.”

It always was a little weird to think of Spike as a member of Angel Investigations. “But aren’t you…” Buffy began, recalling similar conversations they’d had in the past. “Aren’t you still fixing the fallout from when you all – with the Black Thorn?”

Spike shook his head and snorted, the way he did sometimes with that question. “If you believe what his broodiness keeps saying. According to him, we’re never going to be done.” For a moment, he looked at her, one eyebrow raised. “City’s pretty much what it was, as far as I can tell; look around.” She did, and for a moment more they watched the people walking by behind them, their chatter and the laughter where children were hanging out late with their families. Safe as anything. “Yet far as we’re concerned,” Spike commented, “the mission’s never done.”

“Well, you know Angel,” Buffy said with a smile, trying to lighten the tone. Spike looked back at her and she felt a little lightened herself. “That’s how he sees things, all the boogiemen in the shadows, boogying away… He’s like that Don Quixote guy, all kiohtic and stuff.”

Despite himself, Spike laughed, genuine amusement brightening the look on his face. She was slightly confused until he asked, “You mean quixotic?”

“Oh…” She frowned, leaning into his side. “Is that how you say that word?” Never mind, she thought. She’d only ever seen it written down. Resting the back of her hand on Spike’s leg, she offered him a churro as she continued, “Whatever. He’s like that, anyway.” Spike didn’t take a snack, so much as the whole bag, moving it to his lap so he could twine their fingers together in a pleasantly tingling handhold. “Maybe not so much with the windmills,” she was still trying to explain what she meant, “because I’m sure there’s at least a little bit of badness out there. But it’s like…” There needed to be a book of analogies for these occasions. “So, there’s a city of windmills, right, and that’s LA – and there are some giant-demon things living inside them, getting their stuff together, ready to bash the populace. That’s kind of bad – but they aren’t gonna go away, because more windmill-loving giant-demons are gonna move in the moment you kill any of them. But they aren’t organised, so it could be worse. They’re just doing their thing.” She had a point. She _had_ a _point_. “ _But_ Angel didn’t get the memo, so _he_ thinks they’re all the giants in the world, getting together to bring him down.”

When she'd finished, Spike was looking at her like he couldn’t decide whether she’d just solved the meaning of life or whether she was actually going insane. She wasn’t quite sure herself. A few seconds passed and then, as if in lieu of a response, he seized what had become a moment and kissed her. Their wooden bench creaked as they leaned together.

This was something they’d discovered over the last few days: spontaneous connection. Like every other time it felt like a revelation, her skin flushing with warmth. At least one of them felt desperate every time this happened, Buffy knew that, and she could feel either the real sense or the echo of it flip-flopping in her stomach.

Breathing as the kiss ended, she brought her greasy fingers to Spike’s face and worked them through his hair. His nose was smooshed against hers, the circles of his eyes too large in her vision for her to really see them. “Fucking hell, I love you,” he whispered and Buffy immediately felt tears prick her eyes. They’d shared a slice of key lime pie for dessert earlier, and she could taste a remnant of citrus sweetness on his breath.

It didn’t mesh well with the bitterness in the back of her throat, not food-related. “I love you too,” she promised, and she was definitely the desperate one as they kissed again.

She was wondering, because she couldn’t help but think it, what it meant that their conversation had dissolved this way again. That was the downside to spontaneous connection. On the phone they had to talk, because there was nothing else to do, but here they kept getting distracted – every time. It made sense that they were making the most of being with each other, she knew that, but she was starting to worry. What if she went home and this was all they had done? How was she going to remember what it _really_ felt like to talk to him if she didn’t do it while she was here?

As they pulled away, kiss collapsing, she sighed. “What did Illyria mean?” she asked again before she lost her nerve, trying to remember what Spike had said. He didn’t know what they were doing? “You said something to her about wasting my time,” Buffy remembered, not letting him look away and forcing herself to act out three years’ verbal communication in the flesh. “What did you mean? Are we…” Were they OK? She wasn’t even sure. “What is it you’re thinking?”

For his part, Spike looked like he really didn’t want to talk about it. Even as he held her hand again, it felt like he wanted to run away. “All right,” he said, looking down as if he needed to think. More. He sighed, but in the end he spoke, at last. “So, yeah, I don’t know how to do this,” he said bluntly, looking out across the neon-lit bay. “I don’t know what Angel’s point is, what we’re aiming towards.” He paused. “But,” and this was the point he seemed to catch on, slumping with a sigh. She waited for it. “It’s been three years now,” he said after another moment’s hesitation, “and I think I’m getting better at it.”

Buffy didn’t say anything, even as he looked at her and their hands unclasped. In a week she hadn’t heard him sound this serious and she wanted to know what he was going to say.

“There are moments when I feel weak, right?” he continued gently, as if he didn’t want her to be upset. His hand was resting on the back of the bench. “There’s times when I want nothing more than to chuck this all in and come find you.” She smiled, figuring he had to realise she felt the same thing. She was here, after all. “But other times…” Spike smiled back, but didn’t let up, didn’t lie. “I know I’m meant to be _here_ , doing this. And that’s… Round about then I feel like I’m wasting your time, because I don’t know when I won’t be.”

Slowly, she took that in, looking up to the blank, black sky. She understood what he was saying, didn’t she? There’d been a lot of nights in London when she’d looked up to another light-polluted sky, usually a touch grey and smutty orange with cloud, and she’d thought to herself that she was, after everything, in the right place with what she wanted from her life. Even in spite of the days when she had nothing on her mind but worry.

She’d known when she’d booked this trip that she was always going home, leaving Spike behind. The seconds hurt as they took her closer to the airport, but she knew it all the same and she knew she had to live with it. The mission had split them apart, at least for now.

“Are you happy here?” Buffy asked, the moment the question came to her. That was all she wanted to know, wanting the comfort of it.

Not missing a beat, Spike looked at her. And yet his face was blank as he answered, “Is that important?”

Instinctively, she wanted to tell him, _yes_. Even so, she said nothing, remembering for how many years happiness had come second to her calling. The way it still did, in the end.

On track with her thoughts, Spike shrugged, watching her fondly as he spoke. “After everything I’ve done," he said, sounding like he’d accepted it, “I’m not sure happiness is my lot.” What he didn’t say was whether or not he wanted it to be.

“Can we…” Buffy began, remembering then that she’d come on holiday to get away from this feeling of hopelessness. What had they not yet done? She didn’t want to even touch the idea of him ‘wasting’ her time. “Can we go dancing or something?” she asked. “Have some fun? There’s things I want to remember…” She should have made a list, but, really, she wanted to remember everything, have as many memories as possible. “You at least know some bars, right?”

Easily, Spike’s smile morphed into a grin. He looked as relieved as she felt to end conversation. “Oh, follow me,” he said as he held out his hand.

* * *

They stayed out that night, going from bar to club to divier bar and divier club. All Buffy wanted to do was to enjoy the time they had left together and after the first couple of cocktails she could feel it starting to happen, which made her think they should have more. Her sense of the outside world gradually faded away and she was able to focus fully on living it up with Spike, giggling as she licked salt off his cheek and shot tequila, smiling as they danced and he shouted intimately in her ear, _“They’re watching us, love, do you see them? What d’you think they want me to do?”_

She’d never lived like this, just taking shame-free pleasure. Not successfully. But she was safe, and she was loved, and she wanted to remember how to be –

The next morning, Buffy woke up not entirely certain how they’d got into bed, nor, actually, Spike’s apartment. Her limbs were spread-eagled like a starfish and Spike was lying half on top of her, one leg hooked between hers and his arm tickling a boob as she breathed. She felt several kinds of sore, so presumably they’d had a good time – and yeah, actually, there were flashes in her head that certainly felt that way. They couldn’t all be dreams.

“Morning, sunshine,” her vampire murmured as she shifted, his eyes still closed. He had a smile on his face, but his voice sounded like the bottom of an ashtray. “ _Please_ don’t tell me you remember whatever shag of the century it was what got us here. Don’t think I can take the jealousy.” He paused, then cracked one eye open. “‘Less you fancy giving us a blow-by-blow. By blow.”

Giggling, because apparently she was in the mood for naughty puns, Buffy ducked her head as he moved up to give him one little play bite on his shoulder. “Why am I not hungover?” she asked, enjoying the view of his back and running fingers up and down his spine. She felt so light, so free. So strange. “Hell knows how we avoided vomit-Buffy; but where’s dead-skunk-in-my-head-Buffy?”

“What an image you do paint, love…” he commented, before sticking his tongue in her ear. He seemed to measure her wriggling against some sort of scale, because he made a satisfied ‘hmm’ when she was done. “Yeah,” he informed her. “You’re still drunk.” Her hand found a cheek of his ass then, closing on it under the sheets, and as he jerked into a stretch he confessed, “Think I might be too.” Nuzzling her hair, he didn’t seem too sad about it. “What a night…”

Casting a satisfied glance over his shoulder then, however, Buffy saw something that made her freeze. _Memories,_ she thought. Well, at least she was consistent while wasted. That last(-?) bar with the demons had really been a mistake. “Spike,” she began, warningly.

Immediately he asked, “What is it?” Tensing, he fell back from her, out of a grope and into an embrace.

Buffy kept her eyes where they were. “You know your digital camera?”

“Yeah…” He was waiting for the punch line.

How was she going to put this? “I think drunk-us made a sex tape.”


	3. three

“We made a what?” Spike asked, turning over in her arms.

Buffy shook her head, feeling him freeze when he saw it. The nightstand had been pulled away from the wall and set back from the bed, very near Spike’s rickety white wardrobe. On it was a short stack of books – a couple of novels and Spike’s diary thing, her pocket A-Z – and sitting on top of that was his camera, shut down but staring at them like a miniature robot voyeur.

There had always been a latent sense of prudery in her vampire – small enough that she usually had to work pretty hard to find it, but there all the same – so Buffy wasn’t surprised that it took him a couple of seconds to recover. Of course, when he did, he recovered well. With a smirk on his lips and a twinkle in his eye, he turned back to her and murmured, “Well, I never.”

She could feel herself blush as he pecked her on the lips, but she met his smile all the same. “What are you thinking?” she asked, because she wanted him to say it first.

He winked, completely onto her. “Think we need to see what Santa got us, don’t you?” he said, starting to climb out of bed. He seemed to change his mind as he hit the floor, however, pausing before offering a hand. “Actually, d’you fancy the honours?” he asked as she accepted his help to her feet. “I think we also need a fry-up.”

Her stomach gurgled in agreement. “Mmm, French toast…” she thought aloud, kissing collarbone and giving Spike’s neglected morning stiffy a little tug. It was fun to make him jump. And she was getting used to this tape idea; it could come in _very_ handy for after she went home, and there could be supplements via email…

In her mind, also, Buffy could recall a conversation. She’d been saying, distantly, that she’d never seen any porn apart from the whole thing at the Magic Box with Spike and poor Anya (may she rest in peace). Why she’d been saying that, Buffy didn’t know, but they’d been in the apartment and it had made her sad. Spike, like the looming romance hero he was, had told her him and Anya had been nothing, and there had been far too many clothes for it to be considered porn anyway. She’d commented something about how she'd often wondered what _they_ looked like from the outside, because they were freaking hot…

“We can make that happen,” Spike told her breathlessly then, half about the French toast, Buffy was certain, but half – she knew as his voice lilted in surprise – as he remembered saying it the night before.

She looked up at him, a definite smirk filling her expression. _Oh yeah,_ she recalled as she met daring eyes. “Let’s do it,” she agreed, and they sealed the agreement with some A-grade minor-detour tongue action.

“Right,” Spike said, grinning as they pulled back. After a second, he kicked his jeans up into his hands and jerked his head over to the desk in the corner. “The cables should be with the computer,” he explained, clothing himself enough to make her pout. “Password’s, er, ‘p1stolfuck’ with a one instead of the I…”

That made her laugh, and her brain managed to catch up with the logic that there would be frying and hot oily things, which weren’t so great around certain body parts. Clothing was necessary. Picking up his shirt for herself (mostly so he couldn’t wear it), Buffy nodded at him and they split up to do their tasks.

As the clattering started in the kitchenette, Buffy booted up Spike’s laptop and logged in, surprised to come face-to-face with herself and Dawn, grinning from the desktop. They were stood in front of glass, the Embankment skyline behind them, and Buffy blinked as she remembered. Of course, this was a photo she’d sent from Dawn’s birthday last month. They’d gone out for the day and ended up on the London Eye, because her sister had wanted to do ‘one last really touristy thing’ before she left for college.

She was touched, Buffy decided as she plugged the camera in. If she’d thought about it, she probably would have expected to see one of the far pervier photos she’d sent Spike from the last couple of years. But that wasn’t giving him enough credit, was it? It wasn’t like _her_ computer desktop was decorated with pervy pictures of him. They were all hidden away in a really boring-sounding work subfolder… No, her home PC had a collage of various things he’d sent her, little handwritten poems and cartoons about Angel versus the hair gel demon. Dawn had been convinced to make all the scans look like an arty noticeboard, even as she’d complained the sonnets made her puke.

But anyway, this was _not_ the time to be thinking about Dawn, Buffy told herself. Spike’s computer had found the camera’s video files now. There were preview images, including one which ( _oh dear god_ ) definitely showed some tangled naked limbs.

Throwing caution to the wind, Buffy double-clicked. A media player whirred into being.

And then – _”Can you see me?”_ a mini Buffy was suddenly asking from the screen, still clothed and sitting on Spike’s made bed, a little pixelated with her eye line just above the shot. What she actually said was more like, _”Cnyousee-mee…?”_ – all slurred together and sing-song, but Buffy was mostly able to translate. She had half-lidded eyes and was swaying, stretching out a leg in front of her. It was bare and shoeless, and it seemed to be pointing at whoever she was eyeing up, licking her lips like a satisfied cat.

 _I hope it’s not that obvious every time I want some,_ was the first thing Buffy thought to herself, even as she made the video full screen and Spike’s voice came purring from the monitor, _“Clear as fucking crystal, pet.”_ Or, indeed, _”Clear'sfungcryssalpeh_.” He sounded even more ready for it than she did. Also – drunk.

Pixelated Spike came into shot then, and immediately Buffy felt embarrassed. With completely unguarded expressions on their blurry faces, the two figures giggled at what they were doing, looking down the lens and then back to each other where they sat together on the bed. Self-consciousness seemed to be beating them; they played with each other’s fingers, pulling funny faces and nudging knees.

It was, for the moment, really not that sexy. And the lighting was terrible.

“Oh, is it working?” Buffy’s thankfully more sober Spike called over, raising his voice above the hiss of cooking oil.

“Yeah,” she called back, keeping an eye on the screen. “I think you’ve got a while, though. I vaguely remember a conversation…” And right then she did.

Sure enough, Screen Spike broke his first kiss with Screen Buffy to ask, in yet more slurred tones, _“Sure you wanna do this?”_ It was like he was in a teen movie, the good guy character who was going to act like a jerk in the morning.

And Screen Buffy was lapping up seduction like an ingénue, giggling again. _“Uh huh,”_ she said, in a tone girly enough to make sober self shudder. _“Gotta try new things; it’s the rule.”_ Another kiss, which, OK, was a little bit steamy this time. They were getting better. _“Wanna remember.”_ Double OK, Buffy thought as there was more kissing, maybe they could work with this. _”But…”_ And then there was a glance at the camera, which ruined the mood. _“Nervous. What if we’re awful?”_ Screen Buffy was panicking, in an embarrassingly saccharine way. _“What’ll we think in the morning?”_

And so began a lengthy, bizarre and only half-intelligible conversation about how sexy they were and how fun it was going to be to watch the video. All Buffy could do was cringe at how self-absorbed they sounded, not to mention how boring they were being. “Come on, guys!” she told the screen, feeling strangely like she was old to their young. “Get on with the sex already.”

Frustrated by how much her screen version seemed to be thinking, Buffy left the video running and went to help her Spike with his cooking. She had no plans to think today and had certainly had none last night, especially not in lieu of more entertaining activities. All she wanted was to enjoy life, preferably with physical stuff she could remember and fried food. She was going to make a start on it right now.

As she purposefully walked into the bounds of the kitchenette, Spike gave her one look and laughed. “Are they taking their time about it?” he asked, sarcastically slurping his mug of blood. It was as if he’d seen this coming. She could only try to ignore the gooey tones of their recorded voices, focusing on the sounds of cooking and filling herself a glass of water.

“Now I understand those cheesy porn segues,” she commented as she wrapped an arm around Spike’s waist, sipping what would hopefully be her hangover cure. “Real time mood building’s kinda…” She tried to work out what the various fried bits were. “Ooh, you made mushrooms?”

Potential boredom did not, however, deter them from sitting back in front of the screen when the food was done. Maybe it was because she was sitting on Spike’s lap now, his bare arms hiking up her shirt a little too high for it to remain a cover up; maybe it was because sitting still reminded her of the various pleasant aches she was feeling – but watching a badly-lit, drunk version of herself make out with a hot shirtless guy was strangely entertaining.

“So, d’you think they’ve forgotten about the camera yet?” Spike asked, not sounding particularly turned on either. He always thought pictures of himself made him look like a bobble-headed runt, of course, at least secretly. He was way too insecure.

But Buffy supposed he probably thought the same about some of her opinions… “I guess they’ve got to at some point.” God, her make-out technique was really – not that attractive to look at. “Why am I so grabby?” she asked after a few more seconds, disgruntled. “You’re so good with the smoothy-slidey action.”

Spike laughed. “It’s all right, Slayer,” he promised, squeezing her thigh with a hand that held a fork. “I like you grabby.”

With Buffy’s last bite of French toast, Screen Spike finally got a clue and started undoing the buttons down the front of Screen Buffy’s dress. It had been bought specifically with Spike in mind, Buffy remembered, though she knew that particular plan was going to be as cheesy as hell any moment –

“Oh, I remember,” the Spike behind her suddenly said, tightening his hold on her waist. “No bra and no knickers, and I’d been clueless the whole bloody evening. Could’ve had you on the street in ten seconds flat.”

Buffy scowled, not so impressed by that image.

“Sorry, love,” he immediately apologised when she stiffened, kissing her neck through hair. “’Course I wouldn’t have. Not romantic at all. I’m a bad rude man.” Naturally, that was the moment when Screen Spike caught a peep of something he liked, so gave up unbuttoning to simply rip Screen Buffy’s dress in two. Buffy didn’t want to laugh, but it was hard not to, especially when her Spike deadpanned, “As we can see.”

After a few more seconds, however, amusement shifted into something else. The problem was, they could both see how deeply this assault on her dress made Screen Buffy breathe. She was on her knees on the bedclothes, slinky fabric hanging freefall from her shoulders, and her stomach was plunging in and out underneath her ribs. Her boobs sat there like they usually did, but Buffy couldn’t take her eyes from the way her knees were edging open, obviously in response to some feeling. It made her quite conscious of her own un-underweared state.

Softly, Spike’s voice whispered in her ear again, seguing from apologetic to sinful with one tiny growl. “Don’t worry,” he said, as his hand snuck down between her legs. It came with the promise of a slow, leisurely finger fuck. “I’ve got you.”

Giving in, Buffy leaned back, scooching further up his lap as she shook her head. “You so saw this coming,” she accused, even as he shrugged his innocence. Her legs fell open over his thighs, because they always knew what to do, and she was rewarded for the access. “Should get your jeans off,” she commented resignedly, lolling her head back to give him a kiss on the jaw.

He laughed, but at least unbuttoned, providing her with a revolutionary new form of lumbar support.

Was this quite how she had planned this morning? Buffy wondered as she got herself comfy. Feeling a frown cross her face, she wasn’t sure she had plans at all, and it was hard to feel like that was a good thing. She knew she was starting to sober up, because she could feel a headache coming on – and the hollow feeling in her achey limbs was reminding her of all the things they had to talk about…

But she was ignoring that, she decided, closing her eyes for a moment and listening to herself moan. She was settling against curving fingers; they were warming her up again.

On screen, Spike and Buffy had definitely forgotten about the camera. After some interesting gasps and rustles, Buffy opened her eyes to find that they were finally fascinating, rutting with a harsh, drunken energy into the sheets and pawing at each other’s bodies.

She was watching now, but... It wasn’t cinematic in the least, the movements small and jagged, and the dialogue shifted between the mundane, the melodramatic and the incomprehensible with every second thrust. The angle she and Spike were viewing from often didn’t show very much, just skin that she’d seen before, but every now and then there would be a glimpse of something startlingly hardcore or – unctuous, which Buffy wasn’t quite sure what to do with.

Generally, she found it hard to tell whether this was turning her on any more than being tended to by her undressed boyfriend usually would. Was she enjoying this? The giggling, the laughter, she realised with a start, that had fallen by the wayside, and the talking was going too, comments drifting into grunts.

After a few minutes, it was just her being fucked against a headboard, mouth open, panting, her eyes shut. There was a deep frown across her brow. Spike had one foot on the floor and one knee hooked under her thigh, every muscle strained. With her arms spread out along the headboard and up the wall, they were barely touching each other. _Thump-creak, thump-creak, thump._

“Why…” Buffy asked, reaching for Spike’s hand between her legs. “Why don’t we look happy?” His fingers stilled and she could feel a bitter pang of recognition.

“Think that’s concentration?” Spike suggested, though he didn’t sound too convinced. He was probably watching how his screen image paid more attention to his rhythm than his partner. She certainly was. “Don’t know.”

This wasn’t right. But they were drunk, Buffy remembered. Really, really drunk. “I think they’re zoning out,” she said, shivering with disappointment. On screen, the apartment sounded so quiet. “They’re not…” She didn’t like it, she decided. She really didn’t like it. “Can we fastforward, maybe?” she asked, instinctively closing her legs a little and curling more into the comfort rather than the stimulation of Spike’s arms. “Skip some? I don’t like that we aren’t talking.” It reminded her too much of how they’d once been. If there was one thing she expected these days, what with their telephone conversations, it was talking during sex.

“Yeah…” Spike agreed, squeezing her hand. He leaned them forward to move the mouse with his left. “Christ, this thing goes on for hours,” he muttered as the timer showed up.

She entwined their fingers, trying to reassure herself. “At least we got stamina.”

That earned her a snort. “What we got is a brand new memory card…”

After a little bit of skipping, however, it became clear that Screen Buffy and Spike really had forgotten about the recording, so had no compunction about rolling out of shot and off the bed entirely.

 _Whumph._ Watching, they both winced as the couple fell to the ground, out of view.

“Well,” Spike commented simply. “Now I remember why my bum feels bruised.”

“Poor Spike’s bum,” Buffy sympathised even through her frown, reaching behind to give him a little rub.

Tracking through, it took a while before anything more than a phantom limb reappeared, though there were enough recorded moans and satisfied, breathy silences that it sounded like a reasonable time was being had. The video didn’t _actually_ go on for hours, more like seventy-two minutes and thirty-three seconds, but the majority of that seemed to be an empty bed.

Buffy had something of a premonition about what was coming from the feel she was copping of Spike’s ass, but it was still a shock when their counterparts came back on screen, sixty-eight minutes in. They were wrestling on the floor, wrenching each other back into view, when Screen Buffy unceremoniously bent her vampire over the bed and started having her way with the back of him.

With his arm around her waist again, Spike guffawed. She could feel it as his knee jerked, in time with her mouth (and the odd bit of finger). “Slayer,” he asked, impressed. “Did I know you had that in you?”

Apparently he didn’t remember this. But she did, a little, and she had the worst feeling of apprehension about what was coming next. “We’ve done this before, haven’t we?” she said, trying to keep her tone light even as they leaned back from the desk. They could ignore the way she was clutching his arm. “I guess it’s always so fun when you go on me,” she babbled nervously. “You just, you know, you need to get me this drunk so I forget what comes outta there…”

Her heart really wasn’t in the banter. Spike was blissing out on screen, but it was as if he was going through only the best kind of pain, and Buffy, she was concentrating harder than anything, squeezing her eyes shut as she applied herself. It was just like before and, watching, Buffy hated it. She… What was it she could remember?

“Oh, pet,” Spike said suddenly behind her, dropping a long kiss to the crook of her neck. For a moment Buffy wondered what he’d picked up on, but of course he was the first to spot it: on the monitor, her shoulders were shaking.

Screen Buffy kept going until Spike gave them a fairly understated money shot, but after that, in the instant after her partner cried out, she was seizing up with great, keening, drunken sobs. Her forehead slammed into Spike’s tailbone and her fingers clawed on his hips.

At that moment, Buffy remembered exactly what she’d said, what she’d been thinking. The terror of it, the building sense of despair, it all came tumbling out of her. _“Dohnwaaggo,”_ she was gasping through Spike’s speakers, gulping between consonants. _“Dohmaymiggo; donwanleeyou; donwanshhend.”_

Looking dazed, bewildered and a little broken, Spike then was turning back to the camera, dragging Buffy up into his shaking arms. He looked weak and lost in the dead emptiness of the apartment, curling around his girlfriend and shushing as she cried her guts out.

_I don’t wanna go. Don’t make me go. I don’t wanna leave you; I don’t want this to end._

As she watched, remembering, Buffy felt like her heart was being pried open. It was like someone was pulling out all the stupid, selfish, melodramatic thoughts and feelings she’d tried to keep secret and was painting them around the room. This wasn’t meant to happen – ever. Yes, it hurt that they were apart. Maybe it hurt a lot. But she didn’t talk about it, didn’t think it. She certainly didn’t cry about it.

Behind her, Spike was silent, shaky like her. He kept his lips pressed to where her skin escaped from his shirt. Buffy knew he desperately wanted to hear this, couldn’t take his eyes off the screen, but she wanted him to forget, to shut it down so she didn’t have to remember.

 _“Why do I have to love you?”_ Buffy was bawling from the display, a lumpy body of flesh in harsh, bright light and all too comprehensible. Earlier she had sounded so young, playing a game, but now she was every inch the twenty-five year old Slayer, haggard and breaking right at her expected time. _“It’s not fair, it’s not fair to feel like this! And why, why is it – possible… Everyone always knows how to live without me, but I have no idea how to live without you. None. I don’t know – how do I go back home now? How many years am I gonna –”_

And that was when the video cut out, thankfully. The screen went black.

In the silence of the apartment, the air rich with the smell of bacon and eggs, Spike carefully turned her around to meet his wide, blue eyes. Even with his arms around her, Buffy could feel her lip was quivering. “Well,” she said anyway, certain there was no hiding anymore. “I guess that happened.”

For a moment, he stared at her and she wondered how much he remembered. There was more crying than the video showed, Buffy knew, mostly with the same worries on repeat - then comfort, more sex and maybe finally sleep? She should have remembered that getting drunk never worked out for her.

Whatever Spike was remembering, it made him shake his head, mouth in a little O of confusion. “But I don’t know how to live without you,” he promised spontaneously, as if she should have known that all along. “I mean, look at this place.” He cast an arm around them and she looked, took in the gungy carpet and the peeling paint. The dust she hadn’t been going to mention. “It’s a hole.” Spike still sounded confused. “We both know it’s a hole. Most of the time I don’t keep it clean and it’s only because you were coming that I bothered to get rid of the mould.”

She said nothing, not certain how to respond and certain that if she opened her mouth she would cry again. Because that changed nothing, did it? Even if he was living like one of those _Da Vinci Code_ self-harm monks, he was still living, getting by.

Watching her think this, Spike swallowed, eyes flashing before he impulsively lifted her up and took them both back to bed. “I spend hours blackmailing myself not to call you,” he said, cradling her against him. Their half-worn clothes were all lumpy, in the way. “I have targets – eighteen hours since you last called – and at least an hour after I first think of it. I’ve convinced myself Tuesday’s are bad luck, and I can’t disturb your Friday night.” Eyes on hers, he was whispering his devotion, and it was only then she realised that they’d never turned the lights off, before. As his litany continued she was staring at the same halogen-lit white skin from the film. “I can’t call when your soaps are on,” he explained, as if he’d been holding this panic back for years, “or the tennis or your holiday shows. Not when you’re eating, might be sleeping, or when you’ve just got back from work.” He was touching her hair and she was responding, but the comfort was only fractional. “Can’t call if I need it too much, if my fingers shake on the dial. Not until I’ve killed three vampires and a demon since the last time we spoke. Not for six hours after I’ve looked through your photos.”

Was this why he always sounded so together when he called? Buffy knew she was never that strong.

“Maybe – maybe you have it bad, love,” Spike finished, and at last she recognised the desperation, “but I am fucking obsessed.” With a sneer of self-disgust he shut his eyes, inhaling viciously as he touched their foreheads together on the covers. “I’ve _never_ been able to shake it. You know that. It burns off when you’ve been around a while – that last year in Sunnydale when I saw you every day, I coped well enough with that – but these days I’m a joke. I know you used to believe I could be something better, but this, this is all I am.”

Still afraid of her own feelings, Buffy wondered if he’d been trying to hide this the whole time. She found his hands and clasped them in her own, unable to decide which other part of him to hold. “You know what I think’s hard?” she said, willing him to agree with her, because she was starting to believe this was true. “I used to think it was staying strong, you know?” Was she going to say this? She wasn’t meant to say this. But she had to, didn’t she? “Accepting everything that happens around you and keeping to the mission, carrying on. But I… I think it’s harder to, you know, _realise_ what makes you happy and go for it, make things work so you can be. Make – like, permanent decisions about how your life’s gonna change instead of hoping for good things to come along.”

Breathing, Spike ran his thumbs over the backs of her palms. After a moment he smirked, tone full of irony. “I swear I remember saying something like that to you once. Possibly before I had a soul.”

He was watching her, love and amusement clear to read on his face, but she wondered if he’d got what she meant. “I used to have a motto, ‘seize the moment’,” she said, trying to make him understand. “Something happened to both of us, I guess?”

He agreed. “Who’d have thought heroic death could be such a downer?”

Testing him, she nodded as they embraced again. This really, really was not what she was meant to be saying, but it was now or never. She was still a little drunk. “You know,” she said carefully, feeling his ribs under her forearm. “With the new system Giles is putting together, there’s gonna be rewards for that kind of thing. He says I’m gonna be rich; I think I could hook you up with some sweet, sweet recompense too…”

He flicked his eyebrows before kissing her, like he was paying more attention to her tone than her words. “My temptress with the golden moneybags, you are.”

No, she realised, looking at him. Hearing the resistance. He understood.

 _Oh god._ He just didn’t want to say he wouldn’t come.

OK then, she thought rationally, her heart pumping. She’d always seen that coming, hadn’t she? It didn’t matter. “Just tell me you’re happy here,” she said, changing tack, surprising herself by cutting to the chase. He was startled too, but she met his eyes with no guile whatsoever. “Tell me you’re happy here, and I’ll stay.” In the end, wasn’t it all this simple? “Dawn, she’s in college now; there’s nothing in London I need more than you.”

That was what it came down to, wasn’t it? There were many things, many little things that she liked about her current home. Her nearness to Giles and Dawn. The feeling she got walking down her street. The gang from the rink she did Orange Wednesdays with. The local library. The cheese guy at the market. But – she could give it up. She _would_ give it up if she had to.

Even if Spike was looking at her like she’d just thrown away her one last shred of sanity. “Are you fucking kidding me?” he asked, shaking his head at her. “Of course I’m not happy here. I’m doing naff all but live out Angel’s bloody guilt issues, last man standing after his planned suicide dead end – and I have all the home comforts of a bloody… _Termite_. Happy? Christ, most days I would settle for melancholic…”

 _Then why won’t you…?_ She couldn’t ask him to come with her. It was an unspoken agreement that neither of them would ask, because it wasn’t fair. But he wasn’t getting it, he wasn’t getting it at all, and she decided then and there that if he said nothing by the end of her trip, then she would be going home to get her things in order to move.

Buffy had never thought she’d be the one to crack first, but she didn’t care. She didn’t. She couldn’t do this anymore.


	4. four

The détente lasted until the Saturday Buffy was meant to leave. Her flight was that night, so she’d left repacking until that day. Not that Spike had had any closet space for her to unpack into, but most of her stuff wasn’t in the zebra case anymore, so much as strewn across her very own patch of floor.

Lying in bed with very little inclination to move, Buffy looked around the apartment she was going to make her new home. After two weeks without cleaning it looked even worse than when she’d arrived. The old dust was obvious on the skirting boards, and their eating habits had tracked crumbs into unexpected places. The air was heavy with the smell of her unwashed clothes and, honestly, their unwashed sheets were pretty ripe. It was gloomy without any daylight, Spike’s fixtures not really up to their task, and she wasn’t used to hearing the hum of a fridge in her bedroom.

Maybe, Buffy thought, she needed a different plan.

“So, I could get my own place?” she considered out loud, turning onto her side beneath warm covers. Spike was lying next to her with his arms behind his head, which gave her the relatively unattractive view of his thin armpit hair. “Not far away,” she qualified. “Maybe in the building? Somewhere above ground.”

“Eh?” Spike asked, his confusion setting off his bedhead somewhat distractingly. “Council payload going to be that much, then?” He didn’t seem to be getting her point. “Should put it in your main home first, love,” he continued. “Rupert’ll tell you that. Can see why you’d want somewhere not here to stay, but you’re always welcome when you visit.”

“No,” she tried to explain, playing with a sheet hem. “I mean when I move.”

“Move?” He still sounded nonplussed. “Why would you move?”

“To be here,” she said simply.

At that, immediately, he scoffed, “Don’t be daft. What –”

He shut up the moment his brain caught up with his mouth, but she was still stung, jerking away from him as she looked up. There wasn’t that expression on his face the feeling she was feeling made her expect, the one where the guy looked at her like a naïve little girl – but what she saw wasn’t much better. Rather than understanding her, the way she experienced love and what she wanted to do about it, it was like she didn’t make sense.

“Why on earth would you want to be here?” Spike asked more gently, bringing his arms from behind his head to rest uselessly on his stomach. He was an alpha male turned vulnerable.

But, if he hadn’t got it already, Buffy wasn’t sure how she was going to make him understand. She tried again, nonetheless, “I don’t want to be away from you anymore. I mean,” she added when she saw that wasn’t enough, “come on, Spike, there’s been no one else in my life since, what 2001?” It felt like the time for flippant, so she tried flippant. “I know I can be slow, but even I’ve worked out we’re stuck with each other.”

“But…” It seemed as though Spike wasn’t going to help her lighten this moment up. “This place is a hellhole,” he said, as if he didn’t understand why anyone would live in LA if they weren’t spat out there by some jewellery.

“You know I grew up here, right?” she reminded him, unable to quite maintain a smile on her face. “I think I can remember the nice parts.”

“But what would you _do?_ ” he then asked, worriedly enough to make her frown. “It’s not like we’ve got much happening. And don’t they need you back in London? I thought you’d settled in all right – and what about when the niblet comes home for her holidays? I thought they still gave the kids a load of them, time to read and all that.”

These were, of course, all extremely valid points. “I haven’t exactly worked through the details yet,” Buffy confessed, mostly upset that he didn’t have the solutions. This was supposed to be something he’d fantasised about, worked through in his head a hundred times. She knew all the places she would take him so he could settle into London, the guy friends she’d introduce him to so they could bond and watch sports. Toby her skating partner, he was gay, so hopefully Spike could even skip the pissing contest and they could get on with shooting pool and drinking beer. Or whatever it was she knew he liked doing without her. Poker? Mario Kart? Toby did have that job at the Trocadero…

Shaking herself, Buffy remembered that she wasn’t supposed to be thinking those thoughts anymore. They weren’t going to happen. She would have to come up with new fantasies.

Not least because, yeah, the blank look on Spike’s face implied he had absolutely none at all, not about her coming here. “Look, I have to go shower, OK?” she said, feeling frustrated as she rolled out of bed. Also sticky. Hopefully, she thought, this conversation would go better once she was dressed.

* * *

It didn’t. For a start, Spike somehow managed to keep her busy enough all day that there was no good time to re-raise the issue. She’d been washing conditioner out of her hair when the shower curtain had been pulled aside, and after that it had all been wide-eyed and gentle, wordless – _something_. Somehow they’d ended up running a bath, dozing in it until the water went cold, their heads on Spike’s ratty green towel. Her fingers had grazed the rust and grime around his taps when she’d refilled the tub.

Later, she’d been packing – and neither of them had known how her stuff had come to be distributed in so many odd places, in such a small apartment. Before Buffy knew it, it was almost time to go, and again she was the woman with a zebra print suitcase and a Dorothy Perkins coat, scarf and gloves in her hand luggage for the weather she expected back home.

“I have to make this happen,” she said, laying the folds of her blue pea jacket over her stuff. “You know that right?” He didn’t have to accept it straightaway, she knew. That was what reassured her. There were so many things to sort out that it was going to take a while. She’d have to find a replacement at the Council, a buyer for her house. All her things would need to go into storage, get boxed up for shipping. She’d have to talk to Dawn…

“Buffy, please,” Spike replied shortly, all sense of ease and humour gone from his voice. When she looked up he was watching her, a tick like pain in the muscle of his jaw. “Don’t.”

“Why?” Buffy snapped, squaring off. She was wearing a sweater for the plane and it left her too hot, short-tempered. Flushed, she spat at him, “Why don’t you want me here?” He clearly didn’t and it hurt. Not as much as it would when she’d fully made sense of it, but more than enough.

Looking away, Spike shook his head, running one hand through his hair. “Because you’d be _miserable_ ,” he replied in tones far more even than hers. “I couldn’t bear it.”

“But I’m miserable _now_.” That made him look at her, him and his narrow, hawkish eyes. “I’m a whole host of miserable,” she repeated honestly, because she knew the signs. “I’m all _I Dreamed a Dream_ and berets of revolution.”

“You know exactly what I mean,” he shot back, completely unfazed by her masterful cultural referencing. “You have a life in London –”

“Like you have here, you mean?” Buffy interrupted, pointedly looking around her. Everything Spike owned was portable, impermanent. He had only a tiny closetful of stuff, no nice furniture to speak of. She was sure he never took it anywhere, yet he had a laptop, not a PC, and even his television set gave the impression it was there to be dumped at a moment’s notice. The décor hadn’t been touched since he’d moved in. It chafed and, god, she was sick of dancing around it. “Maybe that’s the better question, huh?” Buffy asked, all her upset bubbling over, “Why won’t you come with me? Why won’t you leave?”

“I have a job to do,” Spike ground out, something starting to burn in his eyes. “You know that.

“Bullshit,” she hissed, trying not to shout. It made him start back. Some kind of warning klaxon sounded in her head, but she spoke over it. “You know as well as I do that Wolfram and Hart are _gone_. The gig you’ve got now is what we call freelance demon slayage, and you could do that anywhere. It’s your _choice_ that keeps you here, nothing else.” Uncertain whether she was shaking with anger or despair, Buffy kept talking, trying to make her point. “For some reason you’d rather work with Angel than with me and – and you know what? No, I don’t wanna move here, away from everything, but I don’t know how else to do this and I am _trying_.”

“Trying to do _what?_ ” He was the first one to shout, right then, and he took two angry steps forward before her glare turned him abruptly away. He started pacing, back and forth the length of the couch. She watched him, stood with her stuff by the kitchenette. “There’s no room for me in your tidy little life,” Spike ranted, “not right now while you’re building it, maybe not ever. All right, yeah, you don’t mind me at the end of a phone line, but that’s enough. I know how much else you’ve got happening.”

In her shock, she let him talk for far longer than she intended. “Are you completely brain dead?” she cut in when she could, the shriek in her voice enough to make him look at her, for a moment, and let her see his uncertainty. “In what world of what ever would you… You _are_ my life, you goddamned idiot, you’re freaking in it.” Like too many times this trip, her eyes itched with tears, but she refused to cry. “I’m sorry I don’t treat my anguish like a design statement; _yeah_ , I have stuff – I have work and Dawn and house and things and _you,_ all herringboned together like, I dunno, a driveway or something. You’re – I need you and you’re far away and it _hurts_.” Why was it no one ever believed her saying this stuff when she was sober?

It looked like Spike, after all, was no exception. Conflicted though his expression was, the way he gulped before he spoke meant she knew he was still going to say no. “I’m doing good here,” he defended, as if he needed her to believe him. “I make a difference.”

“And you think you wouldn’t with me?” That, to her, finally sounded like a reason he would stay away. Even though it was so, so wrong. “When have I ever not let you pull your weight?” she asked him desperately. “When have I held you back? Do you think – is it ‘cause Angel’s a guy or something? ‘Cause you don’t like him that much? You think you can be partners with him but you’d have to be my second in command – like, you could only be my boyfriend?” He wasn’t saying anything, not contradicting her, so she kept talking, insisting, “Do you have any idea how much we need people? How much stuff there is to do that doesn’t even _include_ me? Giles says things sometimes, and I think he’s awkward because of that time he – but, you know, sometimes I think he wants me to recruit you, actually ask out loud. _Giles._ ”

Still Spike said nothing. His closed mouth clenched like she’d offended him, but that was it.

Buffy found herself raising her voice, if only to push back the guilt. She knew he wanted to be with her, she did. She thought she did. “Do you even think about it?” That was what she wanted to know, the words strangling in her throat. “Do you imagine what it would be like? Because I do. I think about it all the goddamn time. And it _screws with my head_.” His silence filled her with another burst of hot anger. Overcome by it, she seized her handbag from where it was sitting under her coat, resting on her hand luggage weekender. “I have these, you know,” she spat viciously, rummaging through her things until she found her spare keys. His keys. Those stupid keys on that stupid punk key chain that he probably didn’t even like. “I carry them around like a crazy person.” With one final glance at them, a measure of their heft, she took an eddy of her desperation and threw every single one at him.

They hit Spike in the chest, straight in the centre of his sternum. Even without his wince, there were enough sharp edges that she knew it had to hurt. “Bloody fuck,” he hissed –

– but she cut him off, eyes burning. “I know you think I don’t love you the same as you love me,” she swore. “No one ever does.” Suddenly a rush of familiarity overcame her and she was eighteen years old again. It made her laugh, bitterly, to recognise she was right back in the same place. There were a couple of rogue tears. “And maybe this is new to you,” she accepted, not looking up with her blurry eyes, “but I have done this all before – and I refuse, I _refuse_ to have another relationship built on promises you don’t intend to keep. I won’t have you tell me ‘someday’ when all of your, your _stuff_ , redemption or whatever, that’s never gonna be done.”

Closing her handbag with shaking hands, Buffy focused then on getting ready to go. It was a little early to leave, but she would hail a cab, keep herself occupied at the airport. There might be traffic on the way. “This isn’t where I wanna live, but I’m saying I’ll come here if you want me, no questions asked. No regrets. _Or_ you could come and live with me, where I’ve got space and a freezer drawer and… I – I can’t do the other way anymore,” she finished as she popped the handle on her suitcase, setting it to wheel. “I just can’t.”

Obviously, Spike didn’t let her leave like that. One glance his way, where he was frowning like he couldn’t keep up with her reasoning, that seemed to be enough for him to realise she was moving to the door, laden with her luggage. In three footsteps he had a hand on her shoulder and was skipping around her bags to get in her way. “Wait,” he begged, non-breath ragged as their eyes met. “Don’t go, don’t –”

Reacting on instinct, not to mention quite a lot of fear, Buffy dropped her suitcase with a thump. With her free hand she grabbed him by the neck, dragging his face to hers. It didn’t feel like a goodbye kiss, refused to, even as she scowled and let him go after less than five seconds. “I’ll call you,” she promised, before she remembered that her part of the decision was made. “Or – or you call me. When you’ve figured it out. Or if you’re figuring.” _Oh, please, just call._ Staring into his eyes, she was already regretting what she’d said. She hadn’t even left yet. “I only need a timeline,” she begged. Spike still looked like he couldn’t think, and she wondered if the inside of his head felt like hers, full of loud noises and flashing lights, panic. “I don’t – there’s no ultimatum. I don’t wanna ultimate. I just, there are plans and every day I know it’ll… If it doesn’t…”

Thankfully he kissed her again, which gave her an excuse, when it ended, to change the subject.

“Come with me to the airport,” she was able to ask, secure in the knowledge he would say yes. Secure on that count at least that they both had the same agenda.

* * *

Over twelve hours later, the next night, Buffy was home.

Her house was cold and empty when she came through the door, colder and emptier even than when she’d left. In part, that was inevitable. The heating wasn’t on. But even so, the long echo was unwelcoming as she turned off her alarm.

Almost immediately Buffy’s gaze was drawn to the hallway's cordless phone, but it didn’t ring. For a long time she didn’t move, first leaning and then sitting, back to the front door as she watched. In her head, she imagined telecomms cables, retracing the route she’d just travelled through exchanges and under the sea. Tried to imagine a message coming through.

Her luggage remained by her side, obscenely cheerful. Junk mail and two freesheet newspapers made her doormat lumpy and uncomfortable. Closing her eyes in the end, Buffy tilted her head back and sighed, regretting.

This felt like a stranger’s life, the cold, the fatigue. And yet, she knew she could live it. It would be easy to live indefinitely.

She should have told Spike that, Buffy thought, not those other, ridiculous things. She would have to tell him when he called. If he ever did again.

* * *

A week passed and Buffy heard nothing. Numbly, she went about her schedule and the next Wednesday she came home from the cinema to find two large suitcases in her hallway. Neither of them was zebra print.

At first, her brain stalled, muscles readying to fight the incompetent burglars she was sure to find raiding her house. Then she caught sight of a familiar coat slung over the bannisters, where she usually threw hers. Compulsively her fingers reached for it, shaking out the leather. There was a light on in her kitchen and she moved towards it, limbs feeling liquid and swift. She only paused by the cupboard under the stairs, just to hang up the coat with her own.

“You’ve done this place all right,” was the first thing Spike said when she saw him, standing up. There was a cup of tea on the table in front of him, the wood protected by one purple coaster. His keys were splayed on its left. He didn’t look a fraction out of place, not the way she’d decorated.

She couldn’t breathe – and yet she kept her cool. “But?” she asked.

Somehow the space between them vanished. “But our telly is _far_ too small,” he told her, looking down his nose.

Hearing him say it, when part of her had always expected him to say it, she found herself headbutting his shoulder and crying, trying not to sob as the tears welled from her eyes.

His arms wrapped around her, squeezing not quite as hard as she was suddenly punishing his ribs. “Bloody hell, woman,” he rasped fondly. “Warn a bloke.” When Buffy started to loosen her hold, he quickly countermanded, “I didn’t say I minded.”

Oh, and there she was crying again. “Why did you – What made you…” It was difficult to feel anything at all, she was so seized up with emotion, so she couldn’t tell if she actually cared about the answer or not.

“Yeah, right,” Spike replied hesitantly, sounding a little sniffly himself. Maybe it was sinking in for him the way it was for her. Or wasn’t. She wasn’t quite sure what was happening. “So,” he continued, self-mockingly, like their conversation had never ended. It hadn’t, really. “I think I had this idea I was living out some sort of noble discontent, like I was meant to be suffering while I…” Then he chuckled, cutting himself off. “Well, no, I didn’t really. That’s bollocks. I don’t really know what was going on. But I had it in my head I was doing more good in LA than I’d manage here – what was it you said about giants living in windmills?” He was getting nervous now, like he’d just realised how presumptuous it was to walk into her house and help himself to stuff in her kitchen. Maybe he'd realised that she didn’t drink tea. “Anyway,” he added. “About thirty seconds after you went through security, I remembered how absolutely un-fucking-happy I usually am. Didn’t come out of the bottle for a few days, and after that bloody _Angel_ said I was depressing him, of all people. Said I had been for a while. At that point it was pretty much a done deal and I felt like it being a surprise…”

Buffy pulled back just enough to see his smirk, when, against her will, an answering bubble of laughter rose in her throat. “You – _shithead!_ ” she swore, trying not to smile as she thwacked him on his damp shoulder. How could it all be that easy? It wasn’t meant to be this easy.

“He’s a tad pissed you didn’t look him up, by the bye,” Spike continued, his eyebrows raised in self-satisfaction. He always thought he was so funny. “You know, go see him when you were in town? I told him he and Blue could visit for Christmas; we’d do a turkey and break out the sherry… What d’you think?”

“I…” She was still processing, very slowly. At the mention of sherry, she realised there was a warm burn in her stomach, like alcohol flushing through her – but she was certain it was something better than that. “Mostly, I think I think two things,” she told him, her arms resting gently on his and her smile irrepressible on her face. “First of all – oh my god – I cannot believe you didn’t remind me to go see Angel; he must think I’m totally rude.” How the hell had that happened? She’d been there two weeks! “I must’ve forgot that the LA where you live – _lived…_ Lived?”

Spike winked at her. She got the flushy, happy feeling again.

“I, uh…” Chuckling sheepishly, Buffy tried to regain her thread, “I think in my head I had your LA, which is where you were and I phoned all the time, and that was somewhere different from Angel’s LA, which was just far away… Well, anyway,” she continued, “I think _that_ and I also think that you don’t think I realise you are totally trying to test me on the whole we’re-partners-and-this-is-your-house-too thing.” Really, his smirk was a grin now. She was still onto him. “But it sucks to be you, buster,” she, frankly, babbled, “because I don’t plan holidays until about a month in advance, so you can do what the hell you want – and I fully expect my next mortgage payment to be cut in half.” For a moment then, she hesitated. “After we find you a job,” she qualified, not wanting him to be poor. That wouldn’t be good. “Huh,” she realised. “You know I know _nothing_ about your financial situation.”

Spontaneously, it seemed, Spike lifted her by the waist and spun them in a circle. “Ooh,” he chided with a giggle, tongue behind his teeth. “Worried you’ve found a man who can’t provide?”

“Nah,” she replied, wrinkling her nose. Boy, she thought – she could really, really get used to this. Whatever it was. Someone had to remind her what was happening. “Just trying to work out how else to make you pay.”

“Oh, right,” Spike said with an interested little purr. He looked down at her chest – which it turned out was heaving a little – and then back up to her eyes. “Fancy I show you my qualifications?”

She knew that would be fun; her bed was larger. But… “Not right now,” Buffy told him blissfully, gazing. After a moment and a blink, she jerked her head back towards the suitcases in the hallway. Oh yeah, she finally worked out. Spike was moving in. She remembered now how this was meant to go. “We’ve got shelf space to fill.”

And that was that.

.


End file.
